In the past half-decade the idea of 1968 has taken on a set of diverse and contradictory political meanings. This chapter interrogates the important function played by the memory of the year’s social upheavals within the work of a range of activists and intellectuals: Paul Berman, Angela Davis, Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin, Bill Ayers, Robert Stone and Susan Brownmiller. All of these figures participated in the events of 1968 as New Left activists in one form or another. In the intervening period, however, they have used memories of 1968 to explain both mutations and continuities in their historical and political thinking. In assessing these developments, the chapter argues that these comparable reconfigurations of the idea of 1968 highlight both the significance and the ambiguity of the year’s events for contemporary political thinking, and suggest that the binary division between New Left and New Right needs to be reconfigured into order to understand the political legacy of 1968 in and beyond the United States.
